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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
In Jean Lagacé’s The Manuscript, Peter Artritis is a St. Petersburg publisher who has spent decades wanting to publish his own fiction. Lawyer Arthur Morin gives him Faith, an unpublished novel left by dead Mississippi physician Dr. Otto Zielgard. Lagacé places long portions of Zielgard’s novel inside The Manuscript, so readers follow its story alongside Peter’s. Faith follows Tampa Bay manager Joe Black and Manuel Garcia, a young baseball player who claims a strange bat can produce Major League home runs. Peter becomes convinced the novel anticipated the real 2008 baseball season, then secretly claims it as his own. Years later, Faith becomes a bestseller under Peter’s name. As people connected to its characters begin recognizing details taken from their lives, the stolen book starts exposing the secret behind Peter’s success.
Jean Lagacé’s The Manuscript is an incredible novel, and the book-within-a-book idea is wonderfully ambitious. Lagacé gives Manuel Garcia, a young player inside Faith, an appealing calmness toward the impossible. That quality is established when Manuel predicts that a teacher’s fatal bullet came from a rifle fired offshore before police confirm it. All the characters stand firm in their own right, and two women in particular stood out. Irma Sanchez, the daughter of a Mississippi waitress, has determination to spare, showing how far she will go as she drives to Florida to question attorney Arthur Morin about Zielgard’s manuscript. Rosa Maman Tour de l’Isle brings some rattling news to the table with crazy implications. Lagacé’s meeting of fiction and reality steals the scenes, such as Pralina recognizing a 1967 calendar described in Faith still hanging inside her boyfriend’s barbershop. Readers drawn to supernatural fiction built around books should put The Manuscript on their reading list.
